Owo AI is live — and it works with your Claude or ChatGPT

Today we’re shipping Owo AI — the Nigerian budget advisor we’ve been promising since we launched. It’s live in the Owo Planner dashboard right now: open your dashboard, hit the Owo AI tab, ask a question, get a Claude-powered answer grounded in your actual budget.

And there’s a bonus — one we didn’t advertise yet because we wanted to ship it together. Owo Planner is now a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. If you already pay for Claude or ChatGPT, you can connect your own AI to your Owo Planner budget and ask it anything. The AI sees your income, expenses, score and archives — just like Owo AI does — but the chat happens in your client of choice.

What Owo AI does

Owo AI is a finance advisor that knows your numbers. Not generic budgeting advice from an American blog — advice grounded in:

• Your actual monthly income in Naira
• Your category allocations (rent, food, transport, savings, family support, tithes …)
• Your spending so far this month
• Your current financial health score and the factors behind it
• Your city — Lagos Island, Lagos Mainland, Abuja, PH, Kano, Ibadan or any of the 12 we support — with rent benchmarks calibrated to that market

It’s built on Claude 3.5 Haiku via Anthropic’s API, with a system prompt that knows about NEPA, generator fuel, owambe, Bolt vs danfo, Piggyvest, Cowrywise, T-Bills, Bamboo, and the rest of Nigerian financial reality.

You can ask it things like:

• “Am I spending too much on rent given my income?”
• “My side hustle paid me ₦80,000 this week — should I save it or pay down rent?”
• “Compare my food spend across the last three months”
• “What’s a realistic transport budget for my commute in Lagos Mainland?”

Two ways to use it

You don’t have to choose — both work today, you can use either or both.

1. Built-in chat (free, easiest)

Open your Owo Planner dashboard, click the Owo AI tab. Type a question. Get an answer in seconds, with your full budget passed as context. We pay the AI bill. You pay nothing extra.

2. Your own Claude or ChatGPT via MCP (more powerful)

Connect your Owo Planner account to Claude Desktop, ChatGPT, Cursor, or any other MCP-capable AI. Your AI client now has six tools it can call: read your budget, list expenses, list inflows, check health score, list past months, compute weekly recap. You use the AI client’s own chat interface — voice mode, multi-turn reasoning, file uploads, all the good stuff.

Why might you prefer mode 2? You already pay for Claude/ChatGPT. The conversation can be much longer and richer. You can combine Owo Planner data with other context the AI sees (e.g. a market price PDF, a bank statement, a news article about NGN inflation).

What MCP is (in 60 seconds)

MCP — Model Context Protocol — is a recent standard for how AI assistants connect to external data sources. Think of it like USB-C for AI: instead of every app building its own ChatGPT plugin and its own Claude integration and its own Gemini plugin, MCP is one protocol that all of them speak.

When you connect Owo Planner via MCP, you’re saying to your AI client: “Here’s a place you can look up budget data when I ask about it.” The AI doesn’t get continuous access — it requests the data only when relevant to your conversation. You can revoke the connection at any time.

Owo Planner’s MCP server is at https://owoplanner.com/api/mcp. It speaks the standard JSON-RPC over HTTP transport. Any client that supports MCP works.

Setup: Claude Desktop

1. Sign in at owoplanner.com/dashboard.
2. Click your account menu (top right) → Connect to Claude / ChatGPT.
3. Give your token a label (e.g. “Claude Desktop”) and click Mint token. You’ll see a owop_… token — copy it now, it won’t be shown again.
4. Open ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on macOS (or %APPDATA%/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json on Windows). Add:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "owo-planner": {
      "transport": {
        "type": "http",
        "url": "https://owoplanner.com/api/mcp",
        "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_OWOP_TOKEN" }
      }
    }
  }
}

5. Restart Claude Desktop.
6. Ask Claude: “What’s my Owo Planner health score? Which category am I overspending on?”

Setup: ChatGPT custom connector

1. Mint a token in your Owo Planner dashboard (same as step 1–3 above).
2. In ChatGPT → Settings → Connectors → Custom → Add:
   • URL: https://owoplanner.com/api/mcp
   • Authentication: Bearer token
   • Token: paste your owop_… token
3. Save. Open a new chat. Ask: “Use Owo Planner to summarise my spending this month.”

Setup: Cursor and other MCP clients

Anything that speaks MCP’s Streamable HTTP transport works. In Cursor: open MCP Settings, add a new server with URL https://owoplanner.com/api/mcp and a header Authorization: Bearer YOUR_OWOP_TOKEN. Same shape for Continue, Zed, Cline, and the rest.

If you want to verify the connection without an AI client, you can curl it directly:

curl -X POST https://owoplanner.com/api/mcp \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_OWOP_TOKEN' \
  -d '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}'

You’ll get back the six tools the AI client will see.

Privacy — what we send, what we don’t

This is a finance app. Privacy isn’t a nice-to-have. Here’s the honest model:

• Built-in Owo AI: When you send a message in our dashboard, your budget snapshot (income, allocations, score, spending) is sent to Anthropic’s API as context for that one turn. Anthropic does not use that data to train models — we use their standard API with zero data retention.
• MCP mode: Your budget data lives in Owo Planner’s Supabase database. When your Claude or ChatGPT calls our MCP server, it requests specific tools (e.g. get_budget) and we return only that data, only to a valid token, only scoped to your user. We don’t see what you ask the AI — only which tools it calls and when.
• Token security: Your MCP token is shown to you exactly once when minted. We store only a SHA-256 hash. If you revoke a token, it’s gone from our database immediately and stops working everywhere.
• Max 5 active tokens per account. Sensible default; prevents accidental token sprawl.

You can revoke any token at any time from the same modal you minted it in. We log token usage (last-used timestamp) so you can audit which clients are active.

Try it

If you already have an Owo Planner account, open the dashboard and click the Owo AI tab — you’re seconds away from your first conversation. If you don’t have an account yet, sign up free; the AI is included.

And if you’re an AI power user with Claude or ChatGPT subscriptions, head straight to the Connect modal and mint your token. The AI you already pay for now has full access to your Nigerian budget.